advantage was taken of his absence by Gholan Kadir Kahn, the Rohilla, to obtain possession of Delhi and the Emperor. This he accomplished by the treachery of the Nazir, or chief eunuch, to whom the management of the imperial establishment was intrusted. The inmates of the palace were treated by the usurper with a degree of malicious barbarity which it is hardly possible to conceive any human being could evince toward his fellow-creatures, unless actually possessed by Satan,
After cruelties of almost every description had been practiced, to extort from the members and retainers of the imperial family every article of value that still remained in their possession, Gholan Kadir continued to withhold from them even the necessaries of life, so that several ladies perished of hunger, and others, maddened by suffering, committed suicide. The royal children were compelled to perform the most humiliating offices; and when at last the wretched Emperor ventured to remonstrate indignantly against the atrocities he was thus compelled to witness, the fierce Rohilla sprang at him with the fury of a wild beast, flung the venerable monarch to the ground, knelt on his breast, and, with his dagger, pierced his eye-balls through and through!
The return of Sindia terminated these terrible scenes. Gholan Kadir fled, but was followed and captured by the Mahratta chief, who cut off his nose, ears, hands, and feet, and sent him in an iron cage to the Emperor—a fearful, though not uncommon, example of Asiatic retributive barbarity. He perished on the road, and his accomplice, the treacherous Nazir, was condemned, and trodden to death by an elephant—a mode of execution long practiced at Delhi.
The condition of the imperial family, though ameliorated, remained barely tolerable during the supremacy of Sindia; for the stated allowance for the support of the Emperor and his thirty children, though liberal in its nominal amount, was so irregularly paid that the imperial household often wanted the necessaries of life.
The real authority of the Moguls had passed away, and it now became a question, Who shall seize the fallen scepter—some one
